Twitter’s founder admits that shutting down the API was “worst thing we did”
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More importantly, the meetups and events they tweeted saw attendance rise and more people know about them in general. It was great for everyone and I had hundreds of thank you tweets, emails, and DMs.
But Twitter's repeated, bizarre, and unexplained API limitations hobbled the system more times than I can count. They'd suddenly suspend one for "API abuse", I'd get it manually reviewed and they'd release it.. only to have 10 suspended the next day. I even started asking followers to tag @TwitterSupport on our behalf and zero progress.
After dozens of suspensions, I finally shut it all down. I haven't come up with a theory beyond Twitter hates tech communities but that feels off..
I've had 3 accounts, 1 of which has been stuck at sub 130 users for over 10 years of posting, no matter what I've tried. That would be f*ing impossible on any platform that truly fosters creativity and even a scrap of post equality/fairness. There is also absolutely no indication nor procedure for contesting a limited status placed on social accounts on platforms like Twitter, it's all done in secret, which adds insult to injury.
Truth is, the minute you mention anything now that is remotely perceived as critical of a platform on the platform, a switch is flipped that prevents you from building anything positive within that community.
Tech sufferers greatly from a "God Complex" syndrome, and it's exactly what will prevent it from getting better. Even the largest social platforms are not insulated from bad leadership being accountable, and frankly, that's the reason why things really die a slow death these days.
Since I decided to just bolster my own site, I get reliable growth, and metrics... Focusing on my own site is a lot less stressful than relying on the gaslighting and unexplained "growth-hobbling" that is now far too typical on social sites...
Since you don’t have social media anymore (or at least Twitter), how do you get new traffic to your site? All via search engines?
I think I know what you mean, though I typically frame it almost like they have an Anti-god problem. Big tech leaders are often explicitly trying to avoid passing moral or ethical judgment, so instead rely on "data" or "numbers." What a lot of the "I-follow-data" cultists seem not to realize is that "data" is basically inherently meaningless per se, thus decision-making based on data alone builds interpretive value judgments into the decision rule being used. It also invites fanatics to start producing manipulated/biased/tendentious "data" that appears to be some impartial metric, but is in fact just veiled motivated reasoning exploited to drive an agenda.
Facebook and Google appear to have followed this to its logical extent, allowing literal algorithms to make decisions "based on data." So has Twitter, though Twitter's system is probably even more dysfunctional.
At least when God damns you, you can argue your case and be presented with the evidence and know who to complain to. Tech damnation involves receiving a vaguely-worded message about polices or "community guidelines" being violated (per some unknown interpretation), or no reason at all. You have no recourse or chance to argue your case, even though many times the damnation was an error.
Despite the rumors, so far I have not seen or even heard of any evidence of a god doing that. Maybe gods need to get a "Tech Complex."
I have ample evidence that all humans are deeply concerned with this concept, however different their conceptions may be; yet I have seen or heard no evidence that could plausibly explain why it helped sustain us as a species.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_morality#Primat...
Tho I'd look beyond, towards reciprocity and deception detection in other animals as well
I’ve always been curious about this course. Maybe this thread will lead me to watch it. https://justiceharvard.org/
I’ll say it again: these are the actions of cowards. I’m ashamed these people are by default charting humanity’s course.
I saw an excellent critique of Roblox the other day, which covered many aspects of their business and different kinds of abuse which are happening in and around their game.
The most bizarre part was that they sent some questions to the company - and the company responded by saying they “clearly weren’t being objective” and essentially gaslighting the people making the video.
I think the people in charge of Roblox seriously don’t see themselves as holding any sort of responsibility to the broader society that pays their bills. It’s like someone watched The Corporation and thought - “oh companies can get away with sociopathic behaviour? I want in!”. Doing harm to the world in the name of your bottom line doesn’t make you clever. It makes you the villain.
(Video in question: https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY )
A few possibilities:
* people generally cannot discern moral realities within complex systems, instead preferring simpler narratives ("he made a lot of money, he must be a decent chap")
* people can see it on occasion, but insist that the problem is the single bad actor rather than the system enabling them
* people realize they can't do much about it, as they're implicitly bound up in this system run amok
At the companies themselves, I blame the C suite entirely. It’s a leadership problem. What is the vision for your company? Why do we all get out of bed in the morning? If the goal is to make the world better, then concerns about how your business is impacting the world would matter. But having a goal to simply to enrich the founders (which seems to be the case with most tech companies), is like making an entire car just so you can drive to the gas station.
Companies like Twitter and Roblox change the world by their very presence. It’s shameful to waste that capacity by not making the world better in the process.
Even if you want to make the most money possible, you usually won’t get there by screwing over your employees and customers.
"Broader society" is not a real entity; it's just a term to denote, presumably, the entire planet's population, given Roblox is not limited to a single country.
People make fun of the "we live in a society" "insight" - sadly it would seem that capitalism has gone so far, that even this is being forgotten now.
Why I'm critiquing is for the same reason I mention your "people" silliness: massive overgeneralisations are sloppy and lead to wrong conclusions.
I don’t expect them to fix everything overnight. But there’s plenty they could do, if they weren’t too busy gaslighting and ignoring any criticism of their platform.
Here's my very frustrated sign off message: https://twitter.com/ATXTechEvents/status/1321837596926947330
I haven't come up with a theory beyond Twitter hates tech communities but that feels off..
Might simply be "money". The "Web 2.0" business model, which actually sometimes makes money, is Revenue = Transactions per second X Revenue per Transaction - (Capital Expense + Operating Expense). It really is that simple.
Capital expense is both the cost of servers and what not which records quarterly as depreciation expense, operating expense is everything you pay per month, whether it is developer salaries, licensing fees, or network bandwidth charges. And transaction revenue is typically in units of $ (or local currency) per 1,000 transactions.
Twitter, is an information business. That is to say the value it provides to people who use it are the consumption of, or distribution of, information.
In previous technologies, one could inject "forced information distribution" (aka advertising) into the "good information" that people valued. And for MBA types without any vision that became their "go to" mantra. We can force ads on the users which people will pay us to do.
It is an adversarial relationship to be sure, there isn't much incentive for Twitter to be "compelling" like there is for audience metric based information services like television shows or movies. And there are plenty of technological mechanisms to utilize for injecting information and for collecting demographic data and reselling it.
The failure in that model, and the one that probably shut down the event tweet network, is that Twitter was not getting enough money from NYC_TechEvents and others for their use of the system in these ways. The "easy"[1] coin was personal data and forced impressions. As a result anything that interfered with those revenue streams was to be shut down. The road not taken was to exploit the time value of information and the imbalance between readers and writers.
There are a number of ways that information gains value, one is its timeliness. The canonical reference for this is stock market quotations. Getting a stream quotes that are 15 minutes delayed is "free", getting those same quotes within a few seconds costs money, and getting them within milliseconds costs exponentially more money. Notice that the "information" here is all the same, it is just "when" (or the time) you see it that is valuable. So let's apply a business model that collects the value in "timeliness" of Twitter.
Twitter keeps me up to date
To extract this value, create two tiers of service, one which is free and the Tweet stream is 15 minutes delayed, one which costs $4.99 / month and the tweet stream is instantaneous.
Twitter lets me reach my group
To extract this value, create two tiers of service. One is free and reaches 10 people per minute. Which is to say your tweet goes out and 10 random followers see it right away, and then in the next minute another 10 see it, and in the next minute another 10, until all of your followers see it. A paid account can increase this diffusion rate from 10 to 100 @$4.99/month, to a million $49.99/month.
These are just a couple of examples of creating a model where the more you value timeliness of the information, the more you have to pay for that. What this does is provide a system that captures the intrinsic value of timely information and allows you to create a value proposition around it. No advertising, just people talking to people, and some wanting to talk to bigger crowds or stay more informed etc, and a whole lot of people who are fine with things being delayed a bit because its free.
Its fun to model these things too. You can analyze what sort of return you would need to have a margin that sustains a business and it becomes just like modelling making widgets in a factory, all of the classic business mechanics work like you would expect. Pricing the value add is just as hard as it is in a goods economy, and pricing mistakes are just as costly. But it equalizes out exactly like it does for goods.
[1] The term easy here is a way of expressing a technique that has worked, for the definition "generated revenue" for worked, in other situations.
Fundamentally that's the result of a toxic, lazy engineering culture that thinks the solution to heavy load is to punish users rather than improving the system. Whoever was in tech leadership positions there at the time should be ashamed of themselves.
It took days? weeks? to get a generic rejection message from a “no reply” email address. Meanwhile — much irony — A16Z can help apps like Clubhouse get super-access since they were also a huge investor in Twitter.
All of this pro- and anti-web3 stuff is a sign that all of these inter-connected webs of egos in our industry are jostling for power in an ecosystem that doesn’t need them very much. Meanwhile, there are lots of people in other verticals who completely missed the boat on the web investment play who are beginning to realize this is their opportunity to jump in and scale their capital alongside the people on the ground. A major investor / operator shakeup is about to take place.
A lot of activity like this is going on behind the scenes. You also have bleeding-edge innovation in capital through structures like Venture DAOs that will blow up the entire space in ways that people haven’t fully thought through because half of this industry is stuck on the “crypto is a scam” narrative of someone with a 2014 understanding of what’s happening in the space.
Web 2.0 was arguably not as expensive, but then again you could also argue that it was not as big a step. If you think about it, web 2.0 is really just taking web 1.0 and adding a lot of fancy stuff like SPA, new fancy protocols and social media.
Web 3.0 however, depending on which vision of the 3.0 you support, ranges from "just" another upgrade to a completely different thing than what we have today.
And to make it quite simple: Completely different things are loads of work. Work means people need to dedicate their time to it, which means they need to be paid.
Data centers, research & development, operations, national infrastructure (eg telecom), chips & hardware, software (R&D to maintenance). Now climb inside any of those segments and walk the horizon of the businesses and costs and what was required to build out what eg semiconductors can do today, or what fiber can do today, or what networks can do today, or what harddrives can do today, or what GPUs can do today, and on and on and on and on it goes.
Do a tally on Google's capital investment since 1998 (year by year and final tally), then tell me Web 2.0 wasn't as expensive; then do it for Apple, Microsoft, AWS, etc. It was drastically more expensive. Web 2.0 also includes China's Internet build-out era, and the global mobile build-out, I really don't need to say anything more than that given the scale everyone here knows we're talking about: Web 2.0 was massively more expensive than Web 1.0, by at least a magnitude globally.
Web 1.0 was laughably trivial in cost compared to Web 2.0. It was petite, tiny, itsy bitsy small, versus scaling to billions of global users across all major economies, and shifting tens of trillions of dollars of GDP online.
Just the entertainment wing of Web 2.0 is larger and more expensive than all of Web 1.0 combined.
Where can I get a concise, recent, high quality and big picture summary of the space? It would be useful because I am out of the loop.
There is so much happening in the field that it’s hard to keep track without spending a few weeks full time first to wrap your head around the main concepts.
https://messari.io/pdf/messari-report-crypto-theses-for-2022...
A full view is actually even bigger than that, but this covers the prominent, well-capitalized and hyped players of the past year, at least.
Who "owns" that relationship? The knowledge of that relationship is necessary for Twitter to run its business, because it has to submit a user's posts to their followers' feeds.
But if I leave Twitter, under GDPR I can ask/make them delete that relationship ("right to be forgotten") but I doubt I can demand that I'm allowed to take a follower's PII, like their Twitter handle, with me to another service.
His actions say a lot more than all of these re-tweet friendly words he’s been spouting. I’m glad we won’t have to trust people like him or the Twitter Developer team, or need their permission, to succeed in the future.
I was at a major social media company on 2016 and overnight these kinds of APIs went from promoting user freedom to radioactive. Don't expect anything from these spineless companies with similarly spineless executives that bow to the woke mob at a slight breeze of discontent.
Of course the privileged few get to break the rules, that doesn't refute my point.
> Moreover, as insiders have indicated, Cambridge Analytica had exactly that sort of privileged relationship with Facebook
https://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-a-guide-...
Maybe they had a privileged relationship with facebook but they got the data from a personality quiz app which requested access to user data (which the users granted).
> I know a ton about that as I was involved in that area about 10 years before you.
Good for you but don't you think that's beside the point?
> you will [generally not] get this kind of access to user data via apis, even if the user grants it to you.
...with the exception that:
> the privileged few get to break the rules
OK?
I remember being shocked at the level of detail, and asking the Dem strategist running the project where he got it from. He wouldn't say at first, but eventually he explained about the ecosystem of companies like Cambridge aggregating the graph data.
Nobody cared in the media until 2016, when social media was scapegoated to cover for Hillary's gross underperformance. I was pretty annoyed at the breathless faux outrage I witnessed from people who literally were using the same exact data for their own purposes.
The spineless CEOs is right. Board members too. Silicon Valley players are desperate to maintain their reputations among the pious peers in their social circles, and also are terrified of the media/activist complex killing their ESG scores and bumping them off of certain millennial/genz targeted "socially responsible" investment products. See Tesla having a lower ESG score than Nike if you want an example of how pissing activists off kills your ESG score.
Certainly you (or the platform you are using) can put technical measures in place to make it hard for me to do automatic manipulation of that data, but I don't think "the right" has anything to do with it.
I'm pretty sure the caveats you started listing here are exactly the type of interesting question the person you're responding to was trying to invoke.
For instance, in the US, if you are my healthcare provider and are granted access to my medical records, the answer is that you can only do a very restricted set of things with that data. Because we -- the US society -- have decided to create "another agreement" called HIPAA.
There's all sorts of stuff like this. GDPR. PCI-DSS. Government-classified information. Anything your company sends out that's marked confidential. These agreements that you so quickly dismiss are exactly where the interesting conversations around data seem to be happening.
Seems to have been the worse flying chicken in recent years. But please tell me why how a service based on people chatting in real-time will scale?
Did he only come to the realization it was the "worst thing" after leaving the positono where he could've fixed it?
Dorsey's passing the buck here, both ways: blaming his predecessor for the error, then saddling his successor with the undone hairball task of fixing it.
And yet, Dorsey's tweet labels the "killing API access", before his 2015-2021 CEO tenure, as the "worst thing we did". Unqualified superlative: "Worst!"
And further Dorsey claims company he no longer runs "will continue to open back up completely". Unqualified superlative: "Completely!"
So he must have some really vivid idea of how the company could undo its "worst" mistake" and pursue a novel, trustworthy openness "completely" - that nonetheless somehow escaped tangible commitments during his reign. Did he figure out how to square the circle of Twitter's business model just in the 24 days since resigning as CEO?
I am a regular user of Twitter and I can't really tell you what the've added over the last 6 years. Some safety-related features, a new layout, 280-character limit, Twitter Spaces - is that it?
I know that opening Twitter might have meant a temporary hit for the stock price, but it's not like the stock was doing well in the first place:
Square went from $12 in 2015 to $83 before COVID to $170 today with a peak around $250.
Twitter went through ups and downs and today it stands at $45, around the same price as in 2013.
I realize it's all way more complicated, but I hope the new CEO turns it into a better product.
- Only a few replies are visible initially
- There's the "more tweets" section below them with algorithmic recommendations
- When you click "load more" on the replies list, it only loads like 4 replies and you have to click it repeatedly to see the entire list, if you have enough patience
And that's only one interaction. There's also the dreaded "{{ user }} follows"/"{{ user }} liked"/"{{ user }} replied"/"{{ user }} received a reply" garbage in the feed. Just hear me out: I want my feed to consist of the tweets from the people I follow, in the order in which they were tweeted. That's it. Nothing more. That's all. If someone I follow would like for someone else's tweet to appear in my feed, there's already a dedicated button that does exactly this.
And I would like to point out that this latest horrendous redesign was rolled out when Jack was still the CEO, and he didn't do a thing to stop it.
I have yet to see any product or service that actually leverages "web 3 technologies" - whatever that means to you - to create something that can't be done with web 2 or that is either marginally or substantially better.
This doesn't mean they don't exist. Rather, I don't even conceptually understand what a service built on "web 3" technologies would accomplish that is distinct from what we have today with web 2 technology.
Does anyone have examples beyond crypto currencies as an investment and NFTs - which is just digital art?
Fundamentally, many of Web 2.0 is distributed, FB, AWS, Google and most tech companies all do massive amounts of working in creating distributed systems - distributed databases, distributed serverless infrastructure, CDNs etc.
The "centralization" is that there are companies that operate these services.
Is the goal of Web 3 to not have companies but have individuals' machines running these?
I certainly don't want my personal computer, phone, Alexa etc running and supporting someone else's "decentralized application".
What is the goal of web 3? I haven't seen any articulate answer that clarifies this question in any meaningful way. I'm hoping someone here can shed some light for me.
ETA: The only interesting use case I can think of is to simplify transfer of ownership of digital assets - ebooks, video games etc. Maybe blockchain would be good at simplifying lending of these digital assets between friends, stores, etc without the need for DRM?
I'd explicitly include TV, movies, and music but very few people purchase these 3 categories since streaming came along.
That’s why they copied the concept a second time with NFTs: it’s a bit awkward to just keep trading fictional currencies for other fictional currencies. Now, you can trade something real: fictional ownership of fictional “art”.
NFT's aren't just digital art; digital art is just an easy implementation of NFT's. DAO's are a decentralized usecase. Centralized entities issuing NFT's redeemable for services at a future point in time is another category. For example, Nike issuing a NFT which can be redeemed for a limited edition shoe rather then selling the shoe online directly, having it be bought up by bots and resold on the 3rd party market. Nike gets a cut of the resale value every time the NFT is resold at minimal effort; they don't even have to build/host the marketplace. Consumers get a limited edition shoe shipped to them directly from the manufacturer with worry about middlemen or authenticity. To your point, people already trust Nike (and many other companies) to send them products.
Do the decentralized "maxi's" like that nike example, probably not. But they don't really get a say whether it exists or not. Everyone is so quick to declare web3 100% dead or 100% going to take over the world. If this was pre social media, nobody would know about web3. The value would be orders of magnitude lower and you'd probably only find out about it once there were "useful products" or never at all if it's a complete failure. But that's not the world we live in anymore.
It offers anonymized payments with low fees. Like Bitcoin but without the chain being visible to anybody.
Unlike with regular payments, the transactions are anonymous, irreversible, and requires no KYC. Most crypto are not fully anonymous. Beware other privacy coins based on zksnarks since their creators are generally anti-anonymity (in the sense they don’t want their tokens to be used in illicit transactions and have pledged to make that harder - this defeats the entire purpose of a privacy coin, and any solution to this would reduce privacy).
While monero is not fully anonymous under 100% of cases - it’s possible to do something to allow transactions to be linked back, such as using the same receiving and sending sub addresses multiple times for transactions - it’s pretty dang good. It’s pretty close to being digital cash. And the fees are pretty low (last I checked maybe $0.10?), which is more or less a permanent feature because it has dynamic block sizes.
BTW, for any blockchain, it’s a good thing for ex fees to be non-zero. Otherwise there is no cost to “spamming” the blockchain which congests the network and increases the size of the chain (potentially making it harder to host).
It is unfortunately based on POW, but on the bright side it uses an asic resistant CPU-based algorithm to prevent centralization.
Genuine question, is crypto sometimes not counted as part of web3 by people in the space? I understand blockchain technology is distinct from crypto currency, but crypto always seems to be included as part of web3 no?
I'll check it out.
I know generally one focus of "web 3" is to simplify transactions especially by not having to integrate or work with credit card companies, local regulations etc especially in countries that don't have that infrastructure to as strong a degree.
Certainly an admirable goal, and one I'd love to see - but I don't believe that a lot of these issues can't be solved better and faster with "web 2" technologies (minus the anonymous piece which is a fair and clear advantage).
The only reason I mention monero is that it’s one of the only cryptos that is not vaporware (it isn’t hyped up based on some as-yet unimplemented capabilities) and has real world uses (digital cash. Battle tested, most popular token for tx on the dark web). You can also imagine that instead of being used on the dark web, it can be used to route around oppressive regimes or evade censorship. It’s permissionless and anonymous which is a unique combo for payment systems. It also has a decent online ecosystem for onboarding from fiat at localmonero.co
Take bitcoin as an example, of course you can make internet money cheaper using centralized service but it would be bad because you have to put a lot of trust into someone’s hands. That culture and mindset grows into whole finance applications where you get defi and property rights where you get nft. Nft is not only digital art you can use nft to represent domain names and this will cut out authority middle man out of the equation - your keys your domain, it’s impossible to do with web2.
Some people dismiss these as important but that’s what people in crypto are concerned with - replacement of unnecessary middleman, gatekeepers, regulations with transparent cryptography and code. If you subscribe to this values than you add new constraints and previous solutions that can be better and faster no longer work.
Has that held up in court yet?
I do think what you’re implying is correct that you actually do need to go through KYC for some payments/business relationships regardless of whether they’re conducted through the regular banking system, cash, or crypto. I’m not a lawyer though
What Web3 is pitched to be is completely antithetical to what most people want in the sense that by it's nature, Web3 basically makes AML and other financial controls pretty much impossible to reliably implement and enforce.
You will not get trivial money transfer over the Internet without a gatekeeper. Not permanently anyway. As soon as the primitive for doing so comes into existence, it is guaranteed to be regulated on a when not if basis.
Whether you try to exploit the short time before the law catches up to it says more about whether you're a gambler or not than anything else.
And if you don't think there's a war on cash with the push for CBDC's you're high. Or have you not noticed the going on 2 year coin shortage entirely because someone just isn't interested in keeping up the coinage supply? Or how there are currency transaction reports to law enforcement on any sizable cash withdrawal, or how banks train employees to red flag any type of regular transacting just below the SAR monitoring point?
It is too profitable and powerful a diplomatic tool to be a realistic outcome in my cynical view for government to do anything but double down on financial surveillance.
>What Web3 is pitched to be is completely antithetical to what most people want in the sense that by it's nature, Web3 basically makes AML and other financial controls pretty much impossible
So you've pretty much made my point with your reply. People don't want KYC, authoritarian governments do. People decide what they are okay with and not governments and as the failed war on drugs has shown governments don't really get what they want long term.
People want private cash and an open financial system and then will have it regardless of what government thinks.
What people want, and what they actually get are two completely different things, and the process of moving from one thing to another is slow, bump filled, spans lifetimes, and requires a refresher every few generations.
I'm not denying that KYC and AML is a pain in the arse most people wish would go away. Hell, I'm ready for a bit of that. I have, unfortunately, been part of that system though. I have also seen from sampling of job offerings in the space, that the hires getting planned out paint a picture of societies getting ever more tightly integrated, and doubling down on who can participate in the financial system.
A theoretical question for you. Do you believe that authorities will blink at enacting some coercive structural implementation that will give them an effective lever to use for controlling cryptocurrencies? Do not mistake slow progress, for no progress. Especially when immutable stores of data are concerned.
Hard limits on power consumption, limits on hardware manufacture, protocol filtering, other more intrusive measures; it is all on the table.
KYC/AML itself was at one point far outside the Overton Window. It only took a short time for the circumstances to arise for that to rapidly change.
This isn't a case of Tech doe tech's thing, and society does another. The tech will be judged by the rest of society on it's utility, what it enabled, and whether that justifies adoption or regulation.
People are not stupid. Do not mistake not agreeing with you or silence as assent. I apologize if I'm sounding preachy, as it isn't my intent; I merely caution to temper your estimation of societal uptake with a comprehensive reevaluation of the objectives and end goals of the apparatus to which everyone delegates the responsibility of making the infrastructure that even spawned the potential for technology/technique possible.
All tech throws more work at creating minima in terms of facilitating some way of life. By the act of an allegedly representative government, it was decreed there was utility to higher friction in this particular sector of human endeavor.
Wait til the ink is dry to pop the champagne is all I'm trying to say. It's far from a settled question, and life never ceases to find ways to surprise.
I don't know a single person who is in favor of "financial controls" or other coercive behavior by the US government, the FED and various regulatory agencies to track our every transaction and tell us how we are allowed to spend and use our own hard earned money.
if it truly were so unpopular, it'd be on legislators hit lists and talking points. That's the opposite of what I see.
More seriously - I can't really speak to web 3 in general but as far as crypto here's an example:
https://www.ledgerinsights.com/shinhan-standard-bank-trial-s...
Another one: consider you go to a bar, and need to prove you are age of majority. Today you do this with a state issued ID, which are easily forged. What would a digital alternative look like?
You could certainly issue some sort of credential from the state, and present that credential to the bar, and the bar would validate it with the state. Now the state knows you went to the bar.
What if the state doesn't handle the validation, but provides some sort of cryptographically secure assertion to a distributed, decentralized ledger. And the bar doesn't validate your credential (your digital ID) with the state, but verifies it in the ledger.
Another one: distributed session management - https://www.pingidentity.com/content/dam/pic/downloads/resou...
Disclaimer: have worked at both Ping and Hedera
What if it were easy and dirt cheap to make a provable claim about anything, in seconds, with a fraction of the infrastructure cost?
Like "I am signed into this application". Or "I have received a covid vaccine", or "i authorized this payment". Theres probably a lot more, my background is in identity so those are the ones I know.
Yes you can do those today but they all carry significant cost, and as a result there are significant moats around established players.
Just like Letterman asking "why do I need such information, have you heard of magazines?". Its true, magazines can do that. Just like PKI can do all those things.
But what about smaller entities, or even individuals. And what if they don't want to verify their identity but maybe an action.
Its not introducing anything new. It's just lowering the capital costs to doing it. Much like the internet lowered the costs to publishing and distributing an essay.
What can be manipulated is the visual representation of the passport. Since some people want to quickly verify a date. That wouldn't work with an Eid reader, that can be used offline.
No need for blockchain when a central authority is issuing identity documents anyway.
If you want to delegate signing authority just do something like SSL certs.
For many use cases, Crypto doesn't do things a PKI can't. It just does them without some of those limitations.
How so?
The hard problem is linking a public key to a real-world identity. A blockchain doesn’t help with this in any way.
You're david letterman.
In a way Letterman absolutely had great points: you don't need to watch baseball on your computer, you have a radio for that. You don't need access to this information via a computer, you can use magazines for that.
Looking back on this almost thirty years later, what was missing is the limitations and the consequences.
Yes, you could use your radio. But you were limited to being able to listen to certain times, or certain places. And only baseball and maybe a few sports.
Yes, you could get that information, but only through the magazine.
What the internet did was lower the barrier to this. 30 years later, and I can watch esport championships hosted in South Korea months ago, for free, after my kids go to bed.
And what were the consequences for print journalism?
I think you need the same idea for evaluating crypto: yes, you can obviously do many of the things crypto can do, without crypto. But what are the limitations? And what will be the consequences?
Similarly, now if you want to transfer very little value without cost, your options are to be within same bank or telecom operator as your receiver. Or watch an ad.
Imagine you could transfer 0.5 cent internationaly every minute or every page load for no added cost. What kind of service would that enable? Content monetising without ads, one example. Censorship-free hosting as a service, the other one.
I don't think it's that: it's a key associated within a particular distributed database to a hash of some digital (or digitized) art, as far as I know.
If you - a tv show, movie, etc - want to use it you can license it from me.
It's no different than a standard contract.
Tangentially related: It amazes me how poorly people seem to understand anything in this space but especially cryptocurrency. In maybe one out of hundred discussions on cryptocurrency do I see any mention of a ledger, which is the entire point. If you use Venmo or any similar cash exchange app then you automatically stand to benefit from the use of a cryptocurrency. Venmo is a ledger. The only reason you are able to send $1 a thousand times a day to your friend with no transaction fee is because you're not actually sending any money to anyone (as most people would understand it). You're changing values in Venmo's database which is an implementation of a digital ledger. Only when you "square up" with Venmo by transferring money out of Venmo into your own bank account does any money move anywhere (in a way that would cost Venmo a non negligible amount of money themselves).
Cryptocurrencies are digital ledgers that, unlike Venmo, are decentralized and cryptographically backed. This means its physically impossible for Venmo (or anyone) to freeze or seize your assets, and impossible for your balances to be hacked or manipulated by a bad actor with too much authority (although your private keys can certainly still be hacked through side channels). Is that worth the energy cost of supporting a system like Bitcoin for every transaction? Not in my opinion, but I wish people would at least make an attempt at understanding what they hell they're talking about.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4
EDIT: a certificate of authenticity with proof of ownership included and modifiable only by the owner.
NFTs are a cryptographic certificate of authenticity for... themselves. There is nothing about NFTs that authenticates anything tangible, digital or otherwise. That is what makes them useless. It's a self referencing, pointless exercise. Anyone can mint an NFT and buy and sell it... but all you've done is create an abstract digital object. The actual copyrightable asset the NFT points to is not authenticated, protected, or otherwise related in any way other than by trust - it's literally a URL, it could be anything. And if you're trusting people again, that's neither decentralized nor any different from traditional auction/trade platforms.
Edit: maybe the obvious attack vector is the mutability of the sentence posted to X.com/123, so I feel like I'm close to a good system but missing something.
It is also worth noting that, in a lot of cases, NFTs don't actually confer any sort of special rights or ownership over the art. Often, NFTs are really just signed links to a thing that was not actually sold to you, with the actual legal ownership of the art staying with the seller.
Upon which you have to trust the artist that they actually did produce the painting themselves, and own the copyright to it, and are authorized to mint an NFT of it. If it later turns out they didn't, the NFT is a fraud. So you're still relying on centralized trust.
You also have to trust the artist not to "double-spend" their work and put it up as an NFT elsewhere or sell its copyright. The NFT itself is not tied to copyright, so there is no legal nor technical protection here.
NFTs are solid blockchain technology resting on a foundation of centralized trust (sure, distributed, but still individually centralized). It's completely against everything those crypto people claim they stand for and they don't even realize it.
It's in the damn name too. Non-Fungible Token. Token. Not Picture. The only thing you're buying and selling is a meaningless token.
I say this every time NFTs come up: go commission some custom artwork from your favorite artist instead, the normal way. At least that way you'll have something unique and personal instead of a procedurally generated monkey, and you don't need cryptononsense to know it's yours.
NFTs still seem potentially useful to me. Let's take one more example: the Mona Lisa currently in the possession of France and held in the Louvre. How do I know all that? I looked it up on Wikipedia and "trust" what I've read. I trust it because I assume any time this painting changes hands its a carefully managed transactions likely involving 6 to 7 figures of USD (just for transaction "fees", not the value of the painting) toward dozens of people to verify various things (the authenticity of the painting, and the authenticity of the purchaser and purchaser's funds, and seller) as well as security, transportation, insurance, and desired publicity.
But maybe there's a different way to go about that kind of transaction. As long as we can establish a few initial conditions collectively with "trust", any future transactions for the Mona Lisa can be, in a way, protected with an NFT. Let's start by collectively agreeing to give the Mona Lisa NFT id "1" on the Ethereum blockchain and give France address "0x01". For whatever reason, the Mona Lisa gets sold to "0x05" as an Ethereum transaction. We no longer need to verify the authenticity of the purchaser's funds (hopefully obvious), nor do we really care who "0x05" is. Everyone who believes in cryptography can now establish that indeed "0x05" is the rightful owner of the Mona Lisa. I no longer need to trust a Wikipedia article, or be important enough to "know someone" who knows how to get in touch with "France" or whoever the current owner is if I'm a serious candidate to purchase it.
If the Mona Lisa gets stolen and later turns up, physically, anywhere, in anyone's hands, the world at least has the ability to say "prove you're 0x05". Anyone who has the ability to do so gets it. Yay! In theory, "0x05" can even sell the Mona Lisa to "0x06", WHILE IT IS IN A THIEF'S "POSSESION", and the rest of the world sans thief can agree that, indeed, "0x06" is now the rightful owner of the Mona Lisa. Pretty much the only thing the NFT doesn't help with at all here is destruction of underlying asset (the ink and canvas we collectively designate "The Mona Lisa").
I don't know. Maybe its a crazy idea. Maybe it just requires re-evaluating the importance we place on a particular organization of molecules (that are technically fungible!) with no utility. An atom-level, "perfect", physical reproduction of the Mona Lisa may even become a possibility one day. So maybe the more important thing really is the abstract idea of proof of ownership of some cryptographically protected numbers.
They are actually a lot of artists that complains that their art is stolen and sold as NFT and the platforms that allow this, don't want to handle the copyright infringements.
You could build an nft based ticketing platform. The ticket issuer issues NFT tickets on the blockchain, all the infrastructure for trading NFTs is in place (you could literally trade concert tickets on OpenSea). There's no "forking" this NFT because the concert venue would only accept the ones they issue. You then show up to the concert venue with your phone, sign a message proving ownership of the ticket, and walk right in. This process eliminates all exploitative middlemen like ticketmaster because all the mechanisms for ticket distribution and selling have been built on web3 already.
No, I can just right-click it.
I mean, I agree with the common snark you're making about NFTs here, but the part you quoted is the part the OP is correct on. :) The part they're getting wrong is conflating NFTs with copyright. An NFT could conceivably be a license itself, but that's not the same thing.
Yep the only thing that stops me is centralised copyright regime, not Blockchain. Blockchain can be a proof of license/ownership but not because of its inherent value, but because we believe particular issuer. Also it's fairly easy for Blockchain to loose connection between who legally own/license particular art with what is on it. Copyright is hard, and sometimes the answer is we don't know.
That's not necessarily true, from what I understand most NFT purchases are not transfer of copyrights.
Let's say I go to a store and buy a CD of my favorite artist. That CD comes with certain restrictions - I can listen to it with my friends, but I can't rent it out to a movie producer that wants to use one of the songs on that CD.
Similarly, when buying NFT, I can use it in a certain way, defined by the license, but unless it's specified, the copyrights still belong to the creator of the artwork.
It doesn't matter if the idea is good, workable or needed (and many are), they are all hyped primarily as it's all about making money and hype makes the money with crypto, not the idea.
Most discussions get bogged down in the "is it a good idea" question, where it's really about a kind of big vision or aim. Crypto doesn't have any attractive (e.g. for me, libre/freedom ) ideals it seems.
It's basically like a startup putting all of its runway into marketing. But with crypto, I suppose, the marketing produces the product and becomes more valuable if it succeeds.
The podcasts Bankless and Tapping into Crypto are also good general explainers of what's going on.
The biggest thing people get stuck on on HN is the "Dropbox is a stupid idea, I can replicate it with rsync" problem. Lots of things in web3 are possible without blockchain but they are a far worse experience.
Some things I'm excited about:
- Royal allows bands to sell an NFT of their songs on release, and then the owner of that NFT gets royalties on all future sales of that song.
- Alchemix gives you no interest loans that pay themselves back over time.
- Pool Together is a decentralized savings account where instead of getting a small interest payment all the interest is pooled and payed out as weekly prizes like a lottery.
- DAOs allow massive decentralized companies to be created around any mission - charity work, building new tech, or even buying a copy of the constitution.
- I work for a company called Balancer where you can create an index fund of your favorite coins and you earn interest from your investments rather than pay fees, as traders can use your fund for arbitrage opportunities.
Just being able to provide liqudity to decentralized finance and get a 10 - 30% yearly APY on it is amazing.
These are all still just the tip of the iceberg. When NFTs are mainstream and we have a global permissionless financial system - that's when creativity will really explode.
I pay for Twitter Blue and I still get ads :)
Speaking for myself, but the majority of ads I see on Twitter are for the generic big-brands (Kraft, P&G, Mars, Ford, etc): stuff that I instantly mentally filter-out. I don't understand why mainstream American TV and web advertising is just so... simultaneously try-hard (with clearly massive production budgets) but also so awful, insipid messaging that insults the intelligence of those watching/reading. I'll admit I used to watch the Superbowl for the ads, but even those are now mostly unwatchable.
...or am I just getting older?
------------
...but every so-often, Twitter will show me an uncannily perfect ad that's matched right-up with my interests and beneficial for everyone (I get to learn about a commercial product or service that I can genuinely benefit from, and the advertiser has my attention): but it's never for anything from a mainstream advertiser, it's usually something very niche (like specialty tooling, non-AWS PaaS services, etc). I actually want to see more of these kinds of ads (well, I'd still rather have zero ads considering I also pay for Twitter Blue), but Twitter just won't.
More like "I'm paying for it... What have gone so bad in my life that lead me to do it". Most of the social media content is too expensive even if we get it for free.
Other apps weren't used to (just) bypass the ads. They offered unique interfaces that an official lowest-common-denominator app never will.
Killing of the API also killed a ton of fun projects that played with the data. These API integrations weren't a threat for the official app. They even were an ad for Twitter itself, showing how much happens on Twitter. Twitter tried to keep this aspect alive, but the butchered API and lost developer goodwill killed off the toy projects too.
9 times out of 10 I find such criticism to be completely self-serving (eg to promote their new venture or agenda), a product of bitterness at the exit, a chance to take a swipe at the powers-that-be or a combination thereof.
Twitter's developer API followed a typical pattern: do anything you can to get traction for your platform. This includes being "open" to encourage developers to build stuff on your platform. Then, when you don't need them anymore, ditch them. From a purely business point of view, he wasn't wrong for doing it. It just surprises me that anyone is still shocked when this happens again (and again... and again...).
Those who are still bitter at getting locked out will champion this quote of course.
Take this quote:
> “IN THE BEGINNING, TWITTER WAS SO OPEN THAT MANY SAW THE POTENTIAL TO BECOME A DECENTRALIZED INTERNET STANDARD, SUCH AS THE SMTP (EMAIL SENDING) PROTOCOL. FOR A WHOLE HOST OF REASONS, ALL REASONABLE AT THE TIME, WE TOOK A DIFFERENT PATH AND WE INCREASINGLY CENTRALIZE TWITTER. BUT A LOT HAS CHANGED OVER THE YEARS”.
Put another way: they chose to be a business. No business chooses to create a federated system, at least no successful business (to date). There's simply no reason to. The problems with spam and abuse of the phone networks, email, texting, etc are largely a result of predictably bad actors in an "open" federated system.
The people who call for open standards either aren't a business or they're losing to the industry leader and they want "open standards" to not die.
[1]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/11/twitter-did-jack-dor...
Given that there was exactly one proprietary twitter 'network', I would not say that none of those reasons were 'reasonable' at the time. They were just wishful thinking in bed with corporate marketing.
I don't think a lot of tech people quite understand what a public good looks like, but Twitter was never it. From day one, it was built as a walled garden, and any access you have to it is through the benevolence of its operators.
From my recollections.. Twitter was a company that had a user base, but no plans or strategy to become actually profitable off that base. They, like many companies at the time, seemed to assume that if you just build the big "next generation open platform" that money would just start falling from the sky... somehow.
Ultimately, the red line meets the black line, and you have to turn to VCs who push you into the most obvious solution: Shut down all the "open platform" dead weight and start pushing advertising.
I don't think these are intentional moves but rather the natural consequence of certain types of silicon valley business "plans."
That said, there's something pure and genuine in him. Real regret, it doesn't come across as an act. And let's face it, Twitter has never really grown up. It's not really a functioning business.
Twitter may primarily be a text-based medium and for that reason it appeals to people who are more textually and informationally oriented. This idea isn't original to me: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2018/5/21/invisible-asymptote..., https://alexdanco.com/2019/10/17/the-audio-revolution/.
Maybe there's much more growth in it: or maybe that's the nature of the company and product.
What has twitter done to go beyond their core product? Not much other than a recent clubhouse clone and a failed snapchat story clone.
Yahoo was the Web 1.0 company that killed a ton of great Web 2.0 projects with destructive acquisitions & fumbled post-acquisition product development.
Twitter's been the Web 2.0 Yahoo, killing a bunch of promising Web 3.0 concepts with their API rugpulls, botched acquisitions, & lethargic product development.
I'm pretty sure Donald Trump saved Twitter. Super controversial president chooses your attention economy platform as primary means of communication? Cha-ching!
you can have decentralization without blockchains. Just adopt the existing standards, or get involved with the W3C / IETF if you want to be part of the process defining the next ones.
Perhaps something to augment RSS for discoverability and internetworking is the ticket. It's not a fully-baked thought, though.
Personal lack of understanding doesn’t mean that something important isn’t taking place (which I am guessing is how you see things since it’s so disgusting to you). Every wave of capitalist innovation is filled with shameless promoters and wannabes, alongside the legitimate stuff... If that bothers you, the messy and chaotic nature of human progress might not be your thing.
As far as I get is that some people wants to decentralice stuff, but I don't really see how is that going to happen.
No offense but everything that has any relationship with "decentralization" or "blockchain" is fairly difficult to use. And even understanding them superficially is not trivial.
So yea. I don’t trust Twitter’s ability to build a great product.
They’ve shown they’re incapable of doing so, even with a winning lottery ticket.
Really think about that for a moment. Twitter shut down Vine because they couldn’t find a way to monetize it.
Think about how incompetent you have to be to mess that up.
The more pertinent question for me is: was it really that impossible to restore the API access while he was officially the CEO? Are there concerns of stock prices falling? Can he be booted because he adopts "a defeatist attitude" or whatever?
I'd really like to know why he is saying it now but this curiosity will likely remain unsatisfied. :(
But unfortunately Twitter is now reduced to being a global version of your local coffee shop billboard, at best, and the crazy guy calling himself the next Jesus Christ in the public square.
You know what happened? I stopped using Twitter and only very infrequently pop into it now.
[0]https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2021/b...
Well, for the business, maybe. The rampant censorship and double-standards have been far, far worse for the world and society in general.
As long as Twitter remains a publicly traded company, I imagine this unhappy continuum between "Twitter as universal protocol for short messaging" and "Twitter as large publicly traded software company" will always put competing pressures on how open a standard Twitter can ever really become.
I wonder if they ever investigated just making API access paid, not free? Users were paying for 3rd party clients making use of the API just because they liked them so much better already, so clearly there was some money in it. And it seems like the Venn diagram of "using client to avoid seeing ads" and "already running, or soon would run, adblock in the browser" would be pretty darn near a circle. Pretty trivial though to make API access require a paid token per account/user, and heavy Twitter users might well put down $1-10/month to use their client of choice.
Don't know, maybe just an artifact of the era. At the time on the web in general it just seems like there was this real aversion to any sort of paid offerings even if they were pure bonuses for heavy users with no actual content hidden at all. That's changed a lot since then, but still particularly for a company desperate for hard revenue and facing controversy over a specific somewhat power-user feature, a bit curious they didn't just try to monetize it. Doesn't seem like an honest presentation of that would even bother that particular subset, certainly not more then having it axed entirely.
At least “the media” I consume does not “parrot” social media toxicity. It may mention it if it gets traction, as is their job.
You're flat out wrong, until the media you consume don't report anything at all about politics and at that point it's hard to call it media any more - simple reason: many politicians and even some companies communicate mostly with Twitter "soundbites" instead of holding press conferences.
But even if they do, no one is going to trust it sticking around.
Then to not take accountability. “I wasn’t running the company at the time.”
If he was really remorseful he would track down some of the people who’s businesses he destroyed and give them some of that money he earned from Twitter while he “wasn’t running the company at the time”.
The lack of self awareness is astounding.
Worst was the wholesale revoking & denying “blue checks” (objective confirmation of identity) to those of diverse sociopolitical persuasion. This established Twitter as no longer a neutral public forum, but as a biased publisher. “Fact checking” was consequentially established, canceling reasonable & common opinions and facts in favor of a core narrative. This inflection point will eventually doom the forum, however long it takes to go the way of others once-juggernaut now-forgotten town squares.
I see this kind of take all the time but people don't seem to realize that distributed computing doesn't imply decentralized services. Nobody can take away your internet access (well technically someone can) but that doesn't help you when you're stuck on Facebook. You can always send http over a wire.
Jack is exactly right in that "web3" is just a way to build third party owned services on top of a distributed infrastructure, just like companies right now sit on top of the internet. People who don't want to be censored or any third parties can already do this on the internet by running their own site.
People aren't going to interact with ethereum at the protocol level (except for enthusiasts) for the same reason they're now on Twitter and not on Mastodon. Also if "web3" was disintermediated VC's wouldn't spend a single dollar on it, because you can't extract profit from something you don't own.
You can build business and infrastructure without VC involvement. Sometimes it will be healthier for it.
I am interested in learning what that liberty it might bring to those projects.
https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
And even if they missed one, they'll get in later anyway by simply buying the token. Big capital always wins.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. No, I'm not trying to defend profit-extracting VCs or whatever; just trying to defend this place from burning itself to a crisp. Comments like this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588384 are just what we don't need in that regard.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_cooperative]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_utility_cooperatives]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co-operative_federatio...]
I always thought that "web3" meant everything was on the blockchain. In other words, you could theoretically re-invent Twitter as an Ethereum Smart Contract.
In doing so, every "Tweet" would be on the Eth block chain. You'd probably want a web page that interacts with the block chain to read/post tweets, but even a static HTML file on your local hard drive that interacts with Metamask could achieve that. You wouldn't need to run a site.
Of course, therein lies a new problem: Scale. A quick Google says that there are 6,000 tweets sent per second. Meanwhile, the Eth block chain handles what, 10-20 transactions per second, and ends up with fees that are several dollars worth of Eth? Nobody other than political figures and spammers are going to want to pay $5 to send a Tweet.
Isn't in the opposite? Web3 is a decentralized app that runs on top of distributed web2 and centralized infrastructure.
Then why are VCs pouring money into web3 projects every chance they can get?
Web3 has been pitched as a sort of idealized, democratic, community-owned concept, but the reality is mostly a bunch of projects pitching token sales to speculators who think they can sell those tokens to someone else in the future. Investors are cashing in by using their publicity to hype the token in exchange for some of those tokens to re-sell to other speculators. The actual service doesn't actually have to work because it's all speculation at this point.
When I look at projects like ethereum, I see a lot of excitement and innovation around how cooperative game theory can innovate new business models and ways of coordination.
The way Twitter repeatedly rugpulled devs is a perfect example of how broken the web2 model can be. And now the founder of Twitter wants to criticize crypto projects for taking VC money, as if Twitter somehow didn't take VC money and enrich those VCs in its rise to power? The hypocrisy is astounding.
As far as the services, the goal posts keep moving. First there's no application, then store of value is an application, then art collection, then decentralize automatic market makers, then social tokens, then decentralized autonomous organizations. These are young, immature ideas but clearly stuff is happening. Whether it will live up to the grandiose promises, we can't say. But if you want to complain about the web3 advocates making grandiose promises about how their code is going to change the world, well, they stole that playbook directly from the likes of the Google and Twitter founders.
When Dorsey and Google execs complain about crypto, I'm reminded of a quote from HBO's Silicon Valley:
"I don't want to live in a world where someone else is making the world a better place better than we are."
No, that's not correct. When you buy a share of a publicly traded company (or a private one, for that matter), you are literally buying a fraction of their cash on hand, a fraction of their business operations, a fraction of their trademarks, a fraction of their inventory, and so on. You own part of the company.
The difference with cryptocurrency is that people ditched the entire ownership of anything and replaced it with just a token. It's like if you took a company, hollowed out every single thing that made it valuable, and sold the shares as novelty stock.
Anyone suggesting that stocks are just fun tokens that people trade back and forth doesn't understand what stock actually means. I think this misconception is very popular in the cryptocurrency world because it justifies the existence of tokens and crypto coins that aren't actually backed by anything of value. If you're convinced that nothing matters and it's all just tokens anyway, you're more likely to be persuaded to invest in crypto tokens and shun the stock market.
In fact you don’t even get voting rights, unlike traditional stock. GOOG is the one that’s been “hollowed out “.
Likewise, owning a share of GOOG in no way gives you access to their cash.
There is one and only one thing you can do with a share of GOOG - hope to sell it to someone else for more money.
On the flip side, owning ETH gives you a stake which actually does give you governance rights, either via your own validator or a staking pool. And it gives you access to many other ways to participate in the network such as DeFi.
This is just nonsense. The fact that GOOG doesn't pay dividends is not important or meaningful. Buying back shares is more tax efficient for shareholders. Google spent $30 billion on share buybacks in 2020, and authorized $50 billion for share buybacks in 2021. You don't have to trick a "greater fool" into buying your GOOG shares, Google will happily buy them from you with their giant free cash flow. This is just how tax-efficient companies return money to shareholders these days.
I actually agree with you here. The thing is, the fact that Bitcoin or Ethereum doesn't have "intrinsic value" is not important or meaningful either. Obviously GOOG is valuable and obviously BTC is valuable, and obviously ETH is valuable, but in both cases you can play semantic games to toss around economic terms like "greater fool theory", without understanding where the fundamental value actually emerges from, to pretend like they're worthless.
If you actually follow the activity around Bitcoin and Ethereum, the idea that these coins are suddenly going to drop to $0 and nobody will want one is about as absurd as that happening to GOOG.
It's similar to how if someone doesn't like Chrome, they can fork Chromium and make their own version of it and keep complete compatibility with Chromium. The decentralized web does a similar thing except it does it for services instead of strictly software. It's a fully transparent and accessible ecosystem of services whose entire history is immutable and available for anyone to access.
That said, no blockchain technology is remotely close to the point where a massive system like Facebook could possibly hope to run and it may never get to that point either, it's hard enough getting even trivial services to be cost effective on Ethereum... but in principle that's the idea.
If you want to compete with YouTube in the traditional way, better have a CDN, and if it becomes popular even though you're not taking in any revenue, the bandwidth bill is getting paid with VC money or you're going out of business.
If you can more easily build it on top of something like BitTorrent, you don't need the VC money as much. Now what you need is a payment system so your creators can get paid.
The more of these pieces get built and work decentralized, the less capital it takes to compete without relying on or yourself being a centralized service.
Come on, get real.
If I, as the email admin of xyzcorp.biz get too many spammy emails from your domain, you can expect to be blocked / defederated.
are we dismissing smtp now as a protocol?
It'd actually be a massive breach of freedom if you were somehow not allowed to shut out servers from your Mastodon federation—kind of like not having the freedom to block someone on Twitter.
Mastodon is a federated system, so there is no _they_. You can choose not to federate with groups/nodes you don't want, but its basically invite your village type of model. Pro-LGTBQ+ groups don't have to fediate with neonazi groups, if they don't want to.
"...there is no _they_."
but another poster claims,
"Mastodon can lock those servers out of their directories, or out of the main federation-network, though." Which another poster referred to as "de-federation".
Which of you is correct? Is there a "_they_"?
You can get a WordPress blog, install the ActivityPub plugin, and you're now a fediverse actor which other actors can then subscribe to.
Mastodon's cool and all but let's not conflate this piece of software with the bigger network.
I'd personally call it "vaporware".
and look at the talk page, I said the same thing a few weeks ago:
With Mastodon (and other federated systems), each server can cater to its clientele. It doesn’t have to be one size fits all. Want to host alt-right content? Go for it. Other people might not talk to you, but no one will stop you. Want to host BLM content? Go for it. Other people might not talk to you, but no one will stop you. That’s so much better than the centralized model.
The emphasis should be on the 'was' there. PageRank was so much better than the competition that it gave Google an effective monopoly on search. That lack of competition meant Google could focus on how to get users to click on ads displayed alongside search results rather than how to return better results than the competition. Consequently now Google search is only OK at returning what you're after, and the page is 50% ads.
Google hasn't been coasting along on the success of search for decades though thankfully. A lot of Google tech is very, very good (Gmail, Docs, YouTube, GCE, etc). Search is still better than the competitors but that's only because there's only really Bing. The problem is that it's really only Search that drives revenue.
I strongly believe that if anyone made a better search engine than Google, and consequently Google's ad money took a nosedive, Google would be faced with an existential crisis unlike any other business in history. If Apple are building the search product they're rumored to be building all Google staff should be very worried because no jobs will be safe.
Larry ended up making PageRank because the number of sites that linked to a site was the best measure when all links were created by humans and the Web wasn't commercialized. It was an automation/algorithm for the measure most link lists/curators used at the time to determine precedence order and importance, but for one thing, that measure only works when the sites themselves are vetted first (you wouldn't get a link on 'Best Science Links on the WWW' unless the author of the site liked your site and was convinced it wasn't full of crap).
More broadly, as someone who agrees with OldTimeCoffee but thinks it wasn't purposeful, I'd say that search and web crawlers won an early war I'm not sure they should have won. We can't turn back the clock, but I do wonder what it would have looked like if Google were founded 17 years after the Web started and not 7.
It's a comparative statement in response to 'twitter is killing the web'. Twitter has no impact over the web. Public discourse, yes absolutely. But it isn't impacting the web in the same way PageRank (or Google Search more generally) has changed how the web is made.
There was lots of competition, and it turned out Google was way better at being relevant than everyone else. Now there isn't competition, but that's not how it started :)
But even before that, when there were no search engines, there were directories (https://dmoz-odp.org/) which tried to take a taxonomic approach to the whole web, webrings, and putting your URL into print to get people to type it in. The latter culminated in an early version of the QR code: regular barcodes and the "cuecat" barcode scanner.
I think a lot of the modern Web's problems can be traced to the desire to cut out human intermediaries in the early Web, mostly to focus on speed and monetization. (No curators in the models means no need to PAY curators). I also think the rise of the influencer and parasocial relationships are trying to fill the void. Most humans want human context in information searching. Those of us who don't need it are the weird ones, not the standard case.
No, they don't. Ask any librarian about how many patrons of their libraries only interact with them during the check-out process.
I'd argue that things like our cataloguing process counts as 'human context', as do things like our hold and check-out systems, library space arrangement, etc. Even if a patron doesn't interact with a staff member in person, there is a difference between a library and, say, Kindle Unlimited from a UX standpoint.
Human context and human curation doesn't necessary mean human contact.
Archives are similar: There's a ton of work giving things context and making things discoverable even if a researcher never talks to the archivist who's done these things.
If you're going to show up in someone's thread, tell them they're missing the picture, g make a big bold counter claim... for heavens sake have the reasonability to make a refuttable claim. Make sometbing i can disagree with. Make some assertion.
I dont have the faintest clue why you'd make this assertion. The web is free to innovate. What about page rank is a threat to the open web? In my view good interesting stuff is able to grow & succeed adequately.
Maybe im not in a popular camp here, but, not everything on the web needs gangbusters mass critical success. I feel like there's a lot of high interest, active communities & products that arise & grow via word of mouth jiut fine.
I dont see search engines as relevant. I feel like the social processes of the world are far far far more powerful & informative governors, that products & services make themselves. This idea that search is that important doesnt ring at all true to me in the world today. You're getting people who dont know much or have much idea getting connected to low-denominator highly-massified results. This is basically a promise that search will almost never lead to interesting ends. Real, useful, interesting connectivity comes from elsewhere. Good things get started via opt-in interests, not random discovery.
I'd really apprwciate it if you'd at least explain your position at least a little. Just throwing down an opinion without explanation makes discussion or explanation nearly impossible. It's really low grade discussion. I've tried to elaborate some how i think this discussion might go, but you havemt made any real claim other than that you think someone is to blame, not why.
As a point of reference: I follow 1,400 people, including a lot in science and art. I can’t remember a single person I follow being permanently banned.
I'm disgusted by your unsolicited insinuation. What you said, for me, it's similar to someone saying that Navalny might be a criminal because you know many people and don't recall any of them being arrested. It's ignorant and patronizing at the same time.
In this post-truth era it's not uncommon for someone to be falsely accused and persecuted. It's not uncommon for someone to be cancelled just for not agreeing with the mass. In my experience, if hate speech and pseudo science were to be truly banned Twitter would cease to exist.
Also, if you follow ~1400 people how can you be sure that many of those weren't banned or shadow banned?
but twitter murdering in the cradle alternative interfaces, ideas, tools... them de-democratizing democracy... that was deeply deeply deeply traitorous. it really held back the ability of people to participate as they might in democracy, to advance their own perch & perspective in the fray. it keeps us trapped at a low mode, forever and ever. as well as sabotaging the general age of hopefulness & apis we were underway exploring. one huge fuck up for twitter, a mass epic radical loss for human & societal values in general. fuck us.